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Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6 on suspicion of sex trafficking minors in his Manhattan and Florida homes from 2002 to 2005. The arrest comes over a decade after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution and served 13 months in prison. Epstein's real-estate portfolio has played a major role in the ongoing sex-trafficking and sexual abuse allegations against him. ... At the center of the investigation is Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse, which is one of the largest private homes in Manhattan. The FBI raided the seven-story mansion on 9 East 71st...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/12/nintendo-nes-mini-sales-figures/

Emails released by the State Department Monday night show that the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's top unions, had direct access to the office of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Several emails show that requests from Tina Flournoy, union President Randi Weingarten's assistant at the time, for private meetings or phone calls were given priority by Clinton. For example, in a July 20, 2010, message to Clinton's private account "HDR22@clintonemail.com," Flournoy, using her American Federation of Teachers address, said: "Have a little issue I would like to discuss with you over the phone. Not...

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

Denver Public Schools had four times the number of administrators as any other large metro area districts last year, and salaries and benefits for those staffers are $22 million more than the next largest metro district, Colorado Department of Education figures show. The teachers’ union president reviewed the data Watchdog.org obtained and said the nearly $68 million paid to DPS administrators would be better spent on students. “We need to be talking about keeping dollars closer to classroom when it comes to public education,” said Henry Roman, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. “Should they be putting the money...

An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear". Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons. Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism. The Austrian authorities required him to obtain a doctor's certificate that he was "psychologically fit" to drive. The idea came into Mr Alm's noodle three years ago as a way of making a serious, if ironic, point. A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he...

AMERICANS are often ridiculed for lacking knowledge of world news. In August 1997, for example, a Pew Research Center survey found that 79 percent of Americans were aware that the boxer Mike Tyson had bitten the ear of an opponent, while only 40 percent knew that Britain had returned Hong Kong to China that same summer. Despite that information deficit, champions of American public opinion have steadfastly defended its ability to fill in the holes and make rational choices. When hard decisions are required, sociologists and political scientists have long argued, a sleepy public gathers valuable tidbits from the media...